UK-hosted, ISO-accredited data centres. Fully GDPR-compliant.
Speak to the teamPractical guidance for expert witnesses and injury law firms, on medical evidence, court-ready reporting, radiology and keeping clinical data compliant under UK law.
A medico-legal report is a written opinion from a medical expert, prepared for a legal claim or proceedings. It explains a person's injuries or condition, what caused them and what the future is likely to hold, based on the medical records and usually an examination. In civil claims in England and Wales it is expert evidence under Part 35 of the Civil Procedure Rules.
Read articleCausation in clinical negligence has two stages. Factual causation asks whether the breach caused the injury, usually through the but for test on the balance of probabilities. Legal causation asks whether the law should hold the defendant responsible for that loss, looking at intervening acts, remoteness and the scope of the duty.
The Bolam test is the standard English law uses to decide whether a doctor was negligent. A doctor is not in breach of duty if they acted in accordance with a practice accepted as proper by a responsible body of medical opinion in the same field. Since Bolitho that opinion must stand up to logical analysis, and since Montgomery advice about risks is judged by what the patient needed to know.
CPR 35 is Part 35 of the Civil Procedure Rules, which governs expert evidence in civil claims in England and Wales. It limits expert evidence to what is reasonably required, puts the expert's duty to the court above any duty to the client, and, with Practice Direction 35, sets what every expert report must contain.
A claimant was fed answers through smart glasses while being cross-examined, and his evidence was rejected in full. That is the part everyone has written about. In the same judgment, a jointly instructed expert's opinion was also rejected, for a reason that has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with how the expert was instructed.
A High Court judge was given a quotation from a rule that does not exist. The chat transcripts show the AI warning, more than once, that the wording had not been verified against a primary source and should be checked before anyone relied on it. Nobody checked. The judgment is a lesson about supervision rather than about technology, and it reaches anyone who relies on work done by someone else.
A complainant used an AI tool to rehearse answers before cross-examination, and the trial was stopped. The Court of Appeal reversed that decision and ordered a retrial. The case is being reported as a ruling that AI preparation is witness coaching. Read against the judgment, that is not quite what happened, and the difference matters for anyone giving or handling evidence.
Yes. An expert witness can use AI for the reading: extracting facts, building a chronology and finding entries across a medico-legal bundle. The opinion must remain the expert's own, every AI-produced fact must be verified against its source page, and the Part 35 duty to the court is untouched by the tooling.
How to write an expert witness report comes down to a structure the court can follow and check. Lead with the opinion, work through the material and the reasoning, state the limitations plainly, and close with the statements Part 35 requires. This guide gives you the section-by-section shape, a template you can adapt, and the mandatory wording.
The courts are drawing attention to how AI is used in expert and witness evidence: the Court of Appeal in R v FGD, the CJC's review and the BSB's guidance all land on the same idea, that AI use should be transparent to a proportionate degree. For an expert witness that means being able to say what a tool did, what the expert checked, and what stayed the expert's own judgement.
With a record number of claims now settled out of court, early case resolution requires clear evidence and expert opinion. Bundles can run into thousands of pages, but Alldoq Verify streamlines the workflow.
The bundle is almost never complete. A referral with no clinic letter, a test with no result, three weeks of an admission with no notes: gaps like these are routine, and how an expert handles them decides whether the opinion holds. Name the gap and reason around it openly and the report is stronger for it. Work around it in silence and it becomes the thread the other side pulls.
